Read Online The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce - Free Book Online Page B

cavalier approach that helps make the idea of “orphans” a hazy category for Americans—interchangeable across the world, defined most of all by their status as charity objects for prospective US parents. But to an advocate like Benz, that’s just another way of saying there are always more children in need.
    ALTHOUGH BENZ shifted the country he was working with, his approach remained largely the same. When the first group of children arrived for Christmas 2010—“ten gorgeous orphans,” “ten beautiful orphans,” Benz wrote to his supporters, seeming triumphant after so many disappointments in Haiti—he and his team took them on a whirlwind American adventure: to church, to eat lunch at the Montgomery mall food court, to buy sneakers, to an ice rink, to view a Christmas light display, and then to eat pizza. Prospective adoptive parents were invited to a meeting at the BridgeStone chapel with the Ukrainian adoption coordinator who had accompanied the group. At the end of their three-week visit Benz announced that all ten of the children were now in process to be adopted by Christian families who had visited them at BridgeStone. He told a local paper, “We want them to become Christians, yes, but we need them to find families.”
    A year later, in December 2011, BridgeStone welcomed its fourth group of Ukrainian children to Alabama. I came down to see it, entering BridgeStone through country roads flanked by salvage yards, trailer parks, and ranging fields of cotton, where short, brown stems anchored a delicate trail of fluff in the wan winter sun. As I arrived at the camp, half a dozen pale kids, who looked like they were between eight to twelve years old, ran over to my car, opening both front doors and shaking my handsenthusiastically, jabbering introductions in Ukrainian and Russian. In all likelihood the children knew their trip was a chance at adoption and were eager to make a strong first impression on any visitors who came. From my first minutes on the grounds of BridgeStone, it was clear to me that the thin line Benz had attempted to tread in Haiti was still the ministry’s guiding principle: obscuring its ultimate adoption mission behind the façade of a cultural exchange.
    In the visitor’s office a volunteer named Chuck, a heavyset seventy-two-year-old from Virginia, gave me a form to fill out—name, age, and relationship with Jesus—and told me Rule Number One: “We don’t use the ‘a’ word—adoption.” “Since we are not an adoption agency, we do not exist in any way to arrange adoptions,” the form read, warning that visitors must comply with the laws of the United States, Alabama, and Ukraine as well as common sense. “If someone even uses the ‘a’ word with a child, we must ask you to leave BridgeStone.” It awkwardly continued with the notice that, despite this rule, the kids at BridgeStone were adoptable, and interested parents should talk to Benz or BridgeStone’s project coordinator, Eric Carr, to find out how they could proceed. It was the same winking assurance that Benz had given not only to me but also to all of the local media he had spoken with about his plan to surreptitiously promote adoption of Haitian children while telling both the US and Haitian governments that it was only an English-language study exchange.
    After Rule Number One, Chuck said, with the warm weariness of having repeated the same thing many times before, Bridges of Faith suggests visitors love on the orphans until it hurts, and then love them some more. It was a love-bombing approach, reflecting Benz’s wish to give the children in a few weeks a gonzo dose of indulgent American childhood, a honeymoon adventure wherein a childlike Benz, acting as Santa Claus or maybe Willy Wonka, arranged elaborate outings and surprises for the kids. Former coach of the Auburn University football team Gene Chizik and former Mets pitcher Mark Fuller hosted one group of children at a nearby sports center to talk to